Magnet Media Holds Porn/Tech Event in NYC This Tuesday

Posted Mar 10th, 2014 04:00 PM

NEW YORK—Promoting this week's events as "Not at SXSW," one of the special labs New York City-based Magnet Media will be holding this week is called How Porn Drives Mainstream Internet Technology Adoption, which takes place tomorrow, March 11, at Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square, at 12:30pm. Admission is free.

A description of the event, posted here, states, "Startups deliver innovation every day across the Internet. 99% of this innovation is never adopted by mainstream users. But there is one market and one use-case that is an accurate predictor of success on the Internet: Porn. If it works for porn, you probably going to see it in your web browser and on your mobile phone. This talk is not about porn, it's about how porn drives innovation from the lab to main street."

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The lab is being conducted by John Pavley, who is currently the Chief Technology Officer for The Huffington Post. While Pavley might at first blush seem an odd choice to address the subject, he has in fact worked at some other very interesting places during a varied career that, according to his CruncBase profile, includes significant positions, mostly in engineering, at Apple, Claris, DoubleClick, Yahoo!, ContextWeb, Conductor, Lime Wire and Spotify.

Several of those stops put him in the middle of ecommerce behemoths, not to mention major players in content and traffic delivery as well as ad networks and peer-to-peer delivery. Needless to say, there are no adult companies on the list, but it's hard to imagine that over the years Pavley was not intimately informed about issues related to the adult industry and perhaps some of the people working in it, making his views on the subject of porn as a tech driver pretty definitive.